Discuss: A Preview of HTML 5
by Lachlan Hunt
- Editorial Comments
22
A header is not much different from a div. Except it adds semantic meaning to a certain portion of your document.
Does it? What does “header” actually mean? What does it tell me? It tells me, “This is a bunch of stuff that goes at the top”. That’s all header means. I’m not sure that’s terribly helpful.
If we’re going to muck around with new markup, it should actually be meaningful and not just convenient. I want my markup to give additional clues about the content itself, both informational and emotional, not merely support page layout convention. That doesn’t help anyone.
posted at 06:48 pm on December 4, 2007 by amber simmons
23 Normalizing numbered headings will cause confusion
Lachlan, please help me understand why you don’t think HTML 5 will seriously confuse authors by redefining the semantics of numbered headings. In HTML 5, H1 will have the same semantic meaning as H6.
1. This means lower value headings can be used before higher value headings. For example, this will be valid in HTML 5:
<body>
<h6>heading</h6>
<h1>heading</h1>
</body>
2. Skipping heading levels will be valid in HTML 5. For example:
<body>
<h1>heading</h1>
<h3>heading</h3>
</body>
posted at 06:51 pm on December 4, 2007 by Vlad Alexander
24 user power
I’m also torn – it’s generally a great thing that divs and spans have no semantic meaning – it allows us designers more flexibility… but what about the user? If every website were marked up with consistent header and footer tags it would empower the average user (or the disabled user) to apply their own custom stylesheets with much more predictable results – there are plenty of accessibility benefits there.
posted at 06:58 pm on December 4, 2007 by James Smith
25 Headers
Headers tell you more than “stuff that goes on the top”.
A header gives you information about the content which is usefull to know before starting the actual content. It contains all elements that should best be known before starting the content.
Same with the footer, which contains all information related to the content but is useful only as an after-thought. As we read from top to bottom, a header is usually positioned at the top and a footer at the bottom, but the semantic meaning is of course more detailed.
A header is always an intro to content, while a footer is an outro. Same goes with site headers, which display all info relevant to travelling around the site and giving the user info about the site.
It has more semantic power than a <div>, which is just a box. For all other elements, the <div> element is still available, so I don’t really see how we’ll lose flexibility. We’re just given some common element a more detailed name and semantic meaning.
posted at 07:10 pm on December 4, 2007 by Niels Matthijs
26 about the timeline
The charter calls for 3 years, not 10. We’ll see which plan is closer to reality when we get there, I suppose, but I’m betting it’s closer to 3 than 10.
posted at 08:16 pm on December 4, 2007 by Dan Connolly
27 If the time spent on this spec...
… were spent getting all the browser manufacturers to get their presently existing browsers to follow the presently existing spec, the life of every web designer out there would be made 10x better.
I think there’s plenty to be said both ways regarding HTML5, but it doesn’t change the fact that if ie6 was not a part of my life, id get 3x more done. Surely there’s more that can be done to get users off this and other older browsers. Thats where I’d like to see some more effort (another NYT ad, maybe, moz?).
The web world does an awful good job of making new problems before properly fixing old ones.
posted at 08:19 pm on December 4, 2007 by Eric Fields
28 Untitled
How about equal time for XHTML 2? Further reading: [url=“http://xhtml.com/en/future/x-html-5-versus-xhtml-2/”]X/HTML 5 Versus XHTML 2[/url]
posted at 08:55 pm on December 4, 2007 by Adam Sentz
29 Untitled
The HTML 5 spec isn’t expected to be done for another 10-15 years? And then how long until browsers support it?
I believe Dave’s right: the spec won’t be considered finished until there are two (complete?) interoperable browser implementations. The 15 year period includes browser support. You should be able to use some of its new features before then.
Indeed, with the backwards-compatibility stuff, you can start serving documents that are technically HTML 5 already: I believe Daring Fireball is published in HTML 5. You just won’t see any benefit to using elements like <section> yet.
posted at 09:33 pm on December 4, 2007 by Paul Waite
30 New HTML? Waste of time...
Developing a new version of just HTML seems like a waste of time to me. In 10-15 years (assuming the writer of this article wasn’t being sarcastic) I imagine that XHTML will be more of a standard than HTML will be. XHTML is so much more powerful, both in potential and how it’s currently used… in 10 years, I can’t really imagine anyone really wanting to use HTML when you think of all the potential XHTML has.
posted at 09:45 pm on December 4, 2007 by Kevin D
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21 Normalizing numbered headings will cause confusion
Lachlan, please help me understand why you don’t think HTML 5 will seriously confuse authors by redefining the semantics of numbered headings. In HTML 5, H1 will have the same semantic meaning as H6.
1. This means lower value headings can be used before higher value headings. For example, this will be valid in HTML 5:
[body]
[h6]heading[/h6]
[h1]heading[/h1]
[/body]
2. Skipping heading levels will be valid in HTML 5. For example:
[body]
[h1]heading[/h1]
[h3]heading[/h3]
[/body]
(Using [ ] instead of < > in above examples. Sorry, I have no clue how to do code examples using Textile syntax.)
posted at 06:47 pm on December 4, 2007 by Vlad Alexander